7 ms·
More Americans are breaking into the upper middle class
- blinded 7mo agoAnyone have a gift link?
- RedStarComrade 7mo agohttps://archive.ph/2026.04.05-025428/https://www.wsj.com/economy/more-americans-are-breaking-into-the-upper-middle-class-bf8b7cb2 https://archive.ph/2026.04.05-025428/https://www.wsj.com/eco...
- flyingcircus3 7mo agoIve found lately that a few sites, including WSJ, archive.ph just hangs on the loading screen. The existence of your link should make it skip the loading, as in understand it. Is there a trick to this?
- blinded 7mo agoThanks.
- guzfip 7mo agoGreat for these people, but will there be such opportunities for their children? I thought I did well for myself, finding myself among the middle class, the end is on the horizon.
- rvz 7mo ago> but will there be such opportunities for their children? Yes there always are. To Downvoters: This statement is obvious. I'll tell you why then: In 2008, most of you remember the 2008 crash Don't you? There were opportunities then. We had the 2020 crash in the Covid era, there were opportunities as well back then. There will obviously be another crash in this AI hype cycle and the moment the crash arrives, there will certainly be more opportunities from that. I'll give you a massive head start: crypto, x402 / tempo, energy, and robotics.
- alephnerd 7mo ago> but will there be such opportunities for their children Yes, assuming they grew up in a household in the 70th percentile or above [0] income bracket and/or are on good terms with your parents and siblings. At the end of the day, the family unit matters because intergenerational wealth has always been important. > I thought I did well for myself, finding myself among the middle class, the end is on the horizon Are you maxing out your Roth 401K (and if possible) your Roth IRA as well while also keeping fixed costs like rent or mortgage at around 40% of post 401K+IRA disbursement? If so, you have a shot of climbing up into the upper middle class. [0] - https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60807 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60807
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoThe social elevator works well enough to expect that one's children will do well if you provide them with the tools they'll need (which are basically a good education and love and support).
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Computer0 7mo agoIs that an assertion? I don’t know that is necessarily always true in modern America.
- flyingcircus3 7mo agoIt does seem like a lot of people have extrapolated the second half of the 20th century to be the baseline expectation from here on out.
- commandlinefan 7mo agoI'm worried about my kids, but don't forget to worry about yourself, too! I've got just enough saved up for retirement by current retirement calculator standards (if I keep working and contributing until I'm 67), but inflation could easily end up negating all of it long before I can use any of it.
- tdb7893 7mo agoThe headline is a remarkably rosy spin on it when the subheading is "Research shows that ranks of higher earners have grown markedly over last 50 years, while lower rungs of middle class have shrunk". The article is behind a paywall but it makes it sound like inequality is increasing.
- Ajedi32 7mo ago[flagged]
- srean 7mo agoNot necessarily. If the size of the pie is growing then it might be ok for the 'poor'. They get a smaller share of the bigger pie that is still bigger than what they had before. However if the pie hasn't grown as fast as the inequality has grown, then their share has been on a continuous decline. The US is not a high pie growth economy. Rich getting richer can very much better a serious problem when the pie does not grow to keep up.
- Ajedi32 7mo agoThat's just another way of describing a scenerio where the "poor are getting poorer". Focusing on the share of the pie ("inequality") is a red herring, if the poor are getting less wealthy in absolute terms that's bad regardless of whether inequality is increasing or decreasing.
- srean 7mo agoDepends on how poverty is being measured. Many measure it in terms of money and not the sum total of goods and services that they can claim. Infact in lay person literature it is usually measured in terms money (+ liquid assets), at best inflation adjusted if they are comparing different times. This why one needs to think in terms of the 'pie'. > if the poor are getting less wealthy in absolute terms that's bad regardless of whether inequality is increasing or decreasing. In complete agreement with that. I did not realise that my comment conveyed the opposite.
- materialpoint 7mo ago"For the first decade of his career, he lived in an apartment and worried about paying for vacations. Then, in his early 30s (...)" ... here is America, without paid vacation guaranteed by law since the government does not truly care about the middle or working class. It's amazing how serious media can write articles about economy, while the blatant obvious deficits slip right by their nose..
- anxrn 7mo agoWhile I agree with your sentiment, the article seems to be referring to being able to afford vacation trips, not that vacations are unpaid.
- hyperhello 7mo agoThe blatant obvious deficits are where the money is made. The articles are written to help you focus either on pie in the sky or on meaningless stock jitters.
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoMandating by law paid vacations, laid parental leave, etc... doesn't make those things materialize out of thin air. Every company accounts for those things and takes a bite off the paychecks of their employees to cover those expenses. In america a lot of companies offer those without being mandated and those that don't have to offer higher salaries to stay competitive. End result is that employees that want can user those higher salaries to pay for the vacations or take some time off. And those that don't get to keep the extra money, of course.
- guzfip 7mo agoReminds me of when all the Silicon Valley freaks decided to suddenly care about the fertility crisis, but also would turn around and pronounce how young professionals need to be 996 slaves to survive their brave new world.
- alsetmusic 7mo agoAlso, more Americans are living in poverty. But don’t look over there.
- closeparen 7mo agoDoesn't look like it. What's your source? https://www.statista.com/statistics/200463/us-poverty-rate-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/200463/us-poverty-rate-s...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- fuckingretard 7mo ago[dead]
- RajT88 7mo agoPoverty line is different from living paycheck-to-paycheck. The growth is not dramatic, but steady over time: https://institute.bankofamerica.com/content/dam/economic-insights/paycheck-to-paycheck.pdf https://institute.bankofamerica.com/content/dam/economic-ins...
- Computer0 7mo agoWhere I live the income limits for entering homeless housing are over double the federal poverty threshold. It is a completely failed metric.
- closeparen 7mo ago>We consider a measure of necessity spending that includes but is not limited to childcare, external credit card payments, gasoline, general retail, grocery, housing (mortgage/rent), insurance, cable TV/broadband, public transportation, tax payments, vehicle costs and payments. We consider spending across payment channels (ACH, credit and debit card, bill pay). Income is defined as regularly recurring payments into accounts, such as payroll, social security, unemployment insurance pensions, and annuity income. Households are defined as living paycheck to paycheck if in the quarter their necessity spending exceeds 95% of their income This is more thoughtful than some "paycheck to paycheck" discourse, put objectively well-off people definitely put themselves into this picture by signing up for more house, more car, or more credit card spending than even the relatively high level they can afford.
- ljsprague 7mo ago[flagged]
- spwa4 7mo agoYeah that's something you fail to see until you visit the third world or a communist hellhole for the first time. And for mostly the same reason: the government is a dictatorship captured by a few individuals. The inequality in Geneva or New York is MASSIVE. It's a problem. But it's absolutely pitiful compared to inequality in New Delhi or Havana. Plus it's what you keep hearing from ex-Soviets: that apparatchiks and normal people had the same money, but DIDN'T have access to the same stores. Guess which ones had stocked shelves? The problem communism creates, ironically, is massive inequality.
- rapind 7mo ago> The problem communism creates, ironically, is massive inequality. There is no communism. It doesn't and never has existed. It's just an ideal that that corrupt and powerful leaders can espouse while truly being an oligarchy / authoritarianism. It's also great for capitalist oligarchs to point to as a bogey man. The fact that everywhere it's been tried ends up as an oligarchy should make this obvious. Can you point to any real communism in the wild? Just like you can't point to a truly free market... They are just ideas, often touted / abused / blamed.
- rapind 7mo ago> Immigration strategy over the last sixty years clearly unrelated. Near-trillionaires also clearly unrelated.
- ljsprague 7mo agoPor que no los dos?
- htx80nerd 7mo ago[flagged]
- sph 7mo ago> Research shows [...] In American mice, perhaps.
- xtodoubt 7mo ago[dead]
- laidoffamazon 7mo agoAs someone that thinks of myself as a low-caste, middle class American it's interesting seeing all of these people listed in the article making less than me
- HWR_14 7mo agoA lot of people consider themselves middle class and are wrong in that self assessment. It goes both ways, you have people making a half a million a year and people making twenty thousand who both consider themselves middle class.
- laidoffamazon 7mo agoI went to a state school, worked at Amazon and didn’t get a 2300 on my SAT - I definitively am lower caste but the caste/class divergence isn’t well understood in culture I think.
- HWR_14 7mo agoYou're the one bringing up caste. Middle class is determined by income and it's not subjective.
- balderdash 7mo agothe thing that doesn't compute for me is that the definition of upper middle class here is 5-15x the federal poverty line, ok, but in 1970 the federal poverty line was like ~$3k (and ~$22k today) 10x in 1970 (~33k/year) in nyc you could buy a 2,000 sqft apt for like 2.75x your salary [1] today, that same apartment is like >10x - so while perhaps more people are earning "upper middle class" incomes, what that gets you has declined significantly. [1]https://www.elikarealestate.com/blog/tracing-buying-real-estate-new-york-past-100-years/ https://www.elikarealestate.com/blog/tracing-buying-real-est...
- davidw 7mo agoThat sounds specifically like the housing shortage that is afflicting some of the most dynamic, productive parts of the country, like NYC and the California Bay Area. Driven by NIMBYism and some other things, those areas stopped building anything like enough housing, with the obvious result that demand outstripped supply and prices rose, putting them out of reach of many. That's kind of the origin story of the YIMBY movement, which started forming to fight that trend.
- balderdash 7mo agoI don't disagree but i also think in terms of actual numbers, the majority of the people that earn these upper middle income salaries are living in more expensive urban areas (at least before work from home)
- alephnerd 7mo ago> in 1970 (~33k/year) in nyc Comparing NYC in the 1970s to today isn't a "big apple to big apple" comparison. NYC in 1970s was on the verge of bankruptcy [0] and federal receivership, saw 1,000 industrial firms leave annually leading to 500K jobs lost from 1969-76 [1], and saw around 880K residents [2] leave for suburbs or other states. NYC didn't recover until the 2000s [3]. For your discussion, a better comparison should be cities+towns that were rich in the 1970s that remained rich in the 2020s, and cities+towns that were poor in the 1970s and remained poor in the 2020s. Similarly, a better contemporary comparison for NYC in the 1970s would be Detroit or potentially even Los Angeles. [0] - https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2598&context=dlj https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... [1] - https://www.polyarchives.hosting.nyu.edu/exhibits/show/struggle-at-poly-in-the-70s/new-york-city-scale https://www.polyarchives.hosting.nyu.edu/exhibits/show/strug... [2] - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/blackout-gallery/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/blackou... [3] - https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/local-government/publications/pdf/nycreport2012.pdf https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/local-government/publications/p...
- amelius 7mo agoNo kidding. If you allow a population to gamble online, with prediction markets, derivatives, etc. don't be surprised if you widen the wealth gap. More winners, but even more losers. But hey, you only ever hear about the winners, so it's great for the image. America is doing great!
- MoltenMan 7mo agoThe subtitle specifically says 'the lower rungs of middle class have shrunk'? This seems a little ridiculous to just say. As trendy as it is to hate on modern day life and talk about how awful it is, in material terms it's pretty clearly better than it's ever been.
- amelius 7mo ago> The subtitle specifically says 'the lower rungs of middle class have shrunk'? Yes, perhaps because they are now in the class below that?
- happytoexplain 7mo ago>in material terms it's pretty clearly better than it's ever been. On a time scale of centuries, sure. On a time scale of decades, absolutely not.